Case Study: Alfred Wegener Institute

The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research carries out
research in the Arctic and Antarctic as well as in the high and mid latitude oceans. The
institute coordinates German polar research and makes available to national and
international science important infrastructure, e.g. the research ice breaker "Polarstern"
and research stations in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Here, in the computer center of Alfred Wegener Institute we develop a software system
called "Simulation System" or SIM. Our project is part of GITEWS, the German-Indonesian
Tsunami Early Warning System (www.gitews.org).

In the tsunami warning system, the responsibility of the SIM is to match pre-calculated
tsunami scenarios (tsunamis that could have happened) to real incoming sensor data
(measurement that does happen) and provide a list of best fitting scenarios to the system.
In doing so, the SIM provides an extrapolation from point wise measurement to a spatial
situation overview of the ocean. Another functionality of the SIM is to provide access to
the data of the pre-calculated tsunami scenarios and do an abstraction from the actual data
representation.

To do this the SIM offers its interfaces via web services, namely the Web Processing
Service WPS and the Web Notification Service WNS (both specified by the OGC), which are
heavily based on XML.

So I use Oxygen as a plugin to Eclipse, my main development environment, for editing
and creation of XML files for those services. These files describe the service or the
process offered by the service. I also often create XML files that act as test requests sent
to the service.

Then our system includes its own XML formats, so I also use Oxygen for creating the
XML Schemas for our system. And finally, I very often use Oxygen for browsing the
3rdparty XML Schemas used for the Project, such as the OGC Schemas or GML.

I want to say that I like Oxygen very much and that it makes my life as a developer
much easier. Especially the integration with eclipse and the "easy-to-useness" of Oxygen
are very beneficial for my productivity.

I would like to thank you for this great software and I am very happy that you allow me
to use it in your support life program.